David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I have a true love/hate relationship with open-sourced software.

First of all, it is written by programmers. All software is, but generally the entire team of open source software is written by programmers. The programmer think this is the best thing in the world because then there are no business people (suits), marketing people, accountants, lawyers, or people out to make money on it. For the programmers it’s a dream. They get to make what they want, and it’s fun for them. They get to do the code they care about.

Well that’s great and all until someone who isn’t a hardcore programmer in 10 different languages tries to use it. I have ’some’ programming ability. I can write simple cron jobs. I can make myself little things in C++. I can alter code. I can read code generally in a few languages. In Computer Science I got up to pointers and memory management stuff. I’m not a ‘grandmother’ or something when it comes to this. I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to computers and technology in general.

For programmers, the easiest/best thing is to always only have things in the form of code. Who wants a binary they figure?

It reminds me of my very first ventures in Linux circa 1997 or so. Just getting Linux installed (often by compiling everything yourself, setting half of the options, going though god knows how many howtos and man files) was a feat. Getting it so all of your hardware supported was a completely different issue. If you could get linux installed, get a windowing system running, AND get your hardware supported- then you were the man. None of this ‘insert Ubuntu’ DVD and hit enter. In short, it kinda sucked. It felt ‘cool’ to use, but for getting stuff done, it was horrid.

So what’s the best way to have the code out there (since the programmers insist against compiling binaries for common platforms)? A simple zip/rar/tar/dmg file? No. It must be kept in a CVS/Subversion repository. For those who have never tried to get through one of these, it’s a pain in the ass. So many branches of code often sitting around. You never know what will actually work and what won’t. ‘Beta’ quality ranges between, “Someone got it working once” and “It’s more stable than Gmail”.

So you get the code. Then you have to compile it. Sometimes this isn’t so bad. There’s a few package managing systems that can do this for you. I have both Fink and Macports installed on my Macbook Pro. Fine enough.

So I want to run xcircuit. Simple enough. Should just be able to type ‘fink install xcircuit’ or ‘port install xcircuit’ and then type ‘xcircuit’ and boom, it should run right?

Nope. Apparently it wants to use tcl/tk. Great stuff. ‘Wish’ is crashing. Wrong version/compiliation/something. Of course that wasn’t in the readme. It happens to be an issue on EVERY install of OS X that I can find out about. Now you have to troll through a ton of documentation, get another version of tcl installed (again from source), etc… Then boot it with various options.

Tried to find help here. Maybe my Google skills just suck. Typing ‘xcircuit os x problems’ didn’t help much. I did find this, which seems marginally more helpful. I still feel it’s too much to ask of a user. Pen and paper is easier at this point for my schematics.

Then it sits there. Does nothing. Nothing appearing in the console. You can’t tell. You have to run it using X11 instead of terminal, since terminal doesn’t open the windowing system. Grr.

I’ve tried to get 3 different schematic capture pieces of software running so far. All of them have had their own weird requirements. Undocumented of course.

Had a similar problem when trying to do a buildout of Plone. Wrong version of Python apparently ships with OS X. Python is finicky is seems and doesn’t just tell you ‘wrong version, click here to update’. Even with a large number of people in the room, it took me over 2 hours to get a reliable way of installing the software, which included installing the Apple Developer kit, etc… Yea, it was Beta, but so is Gmail.

But, Open Sourced software is great. It’s generally at no cost. It does things other things dont often. I don’t think it’s generally the best interface-wise. I don’t think it’s ’smooth like Apple/Google’ generally. I love using it. I have as many Open-Sourced things on my computer as I can use.

I guess my problem is that some software apparently has an intelligence filter on it for how hard it should be for someone to be ‘cool’ enough to use it. The Programming Gods feel me unworthy to run xcircuit. I’m not ‘leet enough apparently.

Some Open Source software is done right, and simple to install/use.

The user should not have to know about:
a) Compiling software
b) keeping track of version of compiliers/interpeters
c) CVS/Subversion repositories
d) archaic ways of unzipping/decompressing files.
e) the merits of various package management systems
f) The different between a standard terminal, and an ‘x11 terminal’
g) what language the software is written in
h) How to open and modify text preferences, launch daemons, launch processes in the background, etc.
i) They should not have to open the terminal windows. This isn’t a commodore 64. It’s a Macbook Pro!

Some software does this well. The preferred workflow for this should be:

1) Download DMG from website (use of Subversion/ftp/bittorrent client should NOT be needed!)
2) mount dmg image.
3) Drag to Applications
4) Double click on application.

Simple as that. IF compiling software is SO easy for the user, then it should be simple enough for the programmer to compile the software for them, and throw it in a disk image. They will complain, “I don’t have a Mac!”. Umm, 2007 = virtualization. Did you see VMWare’s IPO? Get with the program. I’ve seen plenty of people with standard intel machines run OS X on them. That was old news.

So I’m going back now to trying to ‘force’ my system to run some circuit software. If this keeps up, I’ll have to break down and just buy something that actually works. That’s the reason I use a Mac and left Linux. My Mac generally works and I don’t have to monkey around to get a program working. No, it’s not cool to have to mess with a program (or set of) for 6 hours before you can get work done (and make money).

Tags: commodore 64, frustration, linux, programming, stupid programmers, UI, xcircuit

I need to give a major thank you to David Siedband for purchasing me a 1 year Flickr Pro account. It was a very nice gift and I’m very happy to now be able to upload as many photos as I want to.

Speaking of, I need to dust off my camera and get back to shooting. Haven’t done enough photography lately.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s my flickr acct.

Again, thank you!

Tags: David Siedband, shoutout, thank you

Bush again sits himself against the will of the public and says that we need to stay in Iraq, citing that we pulled out of Vietnam too early.

He said, “Unlike in Vietnam, if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home.”

Why? Why would the Vietcong not follow us but the “terrists” would?

My problems with this are as follows:

1) Why now is it ok to make a comparison to Vietnam? At the beginning of the war, and even prior to it, I was vocal against the war saying that we have no business being there- just as we had no business being in Vietnam.

2) I have always wondered this, what the hell was Bush’s plan for going into Iraq? How did he not think that it would be a mess. I don’t think there was a plan, asides from figuring that everyone would bow down and kiss our feet for bringing democracy (and trying to push Christianity) in the area.

3) The people in the Middle East don’t have a problem with us as much as the media portrays, at least not in our lifestyles. Yes, some see us as heathens, but their main problem is that we go over there and screw with things. We constantly supply weapons and training to the ‘flavor of the week’ and then act like its someone else’s fault when shit goes down. We’re sending a shitload of weapons to the Saudi’s now. Same with Israel, etc… We play favorites and people get killed. They don’t have a problem with the ‘lifestyle of the west’. If they did, why don’t they attack Switzerland or Luxembourg? A big attack there would affect more people in the country %-wise than anything here. Oh that’s right, Switzerland doesn’t randomly take over other countries.

4) If this isn’t nation-building then I dont know what is.

5) Doesn’t every person that has half a brain realize that Vietnam was a horrid idea? The only people that ‘followed’ us here started nail salons. The communists didn’t follow us here, and they didn’t take over.

6) Speaking of, just as a side thing, I hate it when anything’s called communist when speaking about something in implementation. No country to my knowledge has ever tried to put Marx views in to practice fully. Ever. The Viet-cong were not commies.

7) I’m still not understanding how Witches, Commies, and Terrorists aren’t the same term for ’scapegoat’. Americans won’t admit it, but it’s not that different than the Germans scapegoats being Jews, Gypsies, blacks, gays, and handicapped. Find someone that you think causes a problem, and blame the world on them. Create your enemies.

And how is this not like 1984’s perpetual war?

Overall what pisses me off most is that Bush is the #1 (ok, maybe #2 we still have Cheney) enemy of actual Democracy. First of all Democracy is the decisions being made by the people and the people deciding. We don’t have a democracy any more than China does Communism as Marx would have had it. If 70% of the peopel say get out of Iraq, then going against that is excessively anti-democracy. It’s authoritarian. Since they don’t listen to Congress anymore, it’s a fascist dictatorial regime. They answer to no one. They are worse than the terrorists. The terrorists have won, because not only now have they taken our freedom (with us being wiretapped constantly), but they have taken our democracy too.

If this is Vietnam, then we need to do like we did before and pull out immediately. If people kill each other over there, well… we didnt’ pull the triggers. Pulling out doesn’t kill people, people kill people. That’s still their own faults and they have to deal with the consequences.

Tags: 1984, Bush, George Orwell, Vietnam

Sorry to all for being slack and not updating more. There’s some features I’d like to add to this site that I need to work on as well. Work’s been pretty busy, and the last thing I’ve been wanting to do at the end of the day is stare at a computer more.

I’ll try blogging and twittering more.

Tags: Uncategorized

Plone 3.0, the newest version of the content management system built on Zope has been released today. New features include OpenID support, a new portlet architecture, built in wiki support and lots more. Installers are available for Windows, OSX, Linux and SuSE as well as cross-platform source bundles.I’m pretty excited about some of this. The ajax capability means that we will be able to now make some of the sites uber-sexy and Plone 3.0 is also supposed to be a good bit faster. Hmm, time to update my RC2 install I guess…

read more | digg story

Tags: Uncategorized