Today I watched at the Reality Distortion Field around yet another poor Mac fan was pierced by the evil Kernel Panic.

It was a thing of horrible, dark beauty.

I love watching the patch stream for Ubuntu’s upcoming releases. I mean, I only know what maybe 10% of them actually do, but it’s fun to see. Most of the year, for instance, there’s just the occasional maintenance patch, with maintainers releasing new versions, and of course security patches. Then you get to the Debian Import Freeze where, iirc, there’s a flurry of patches and modifications.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

They really do. Let me ask you a question:

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?

You know what Microsoft should include with Windows? A convenient tool to download Firefox! Something you, say, just can’t uninstall, so when you need to download Firefox again for whatever reason, the convenient tool is just… there.

I’m just torn about what to call this tool. Something to do with the internet… something with a little more punch than Firefox Downloader… I’ve got it! We’ll call this tool, “Internet Explorer”!

I’m going to go down in history for this one.

Thanks to TheLink for this. When something goes wrong on an Microsoft system, such as a Windows server, here is a basic check-list to run through. It should take care of… well, lots of things.

1) Retry
2) Restart
3) Reboot
4) Reconfigure
5) Repatch
6) Reinstall (application)
7) Reformat
8) Rebuild (system and application)
9) Retry (everything from #1 to #8)
10) Relinquish / Reassign / Reject (project or task)
11) Resign
12) Résumé

I’ve made a derivative list for Gentoo, should anyone be interested.

1) Recompile
2) Recompile
3) Recompile
4) Recompile
5) Recompile
6) Recompile
7) Recompile
8) Recompile
9) Recompile
10) Recompile
11) Recompile
12) Recompile kernel

You know what I would find funny?

If all the userland tools and common packages like Samba were forked and maintained as GPLv2. Two developmental branches if you will. And if someone were to keep a repository of these forked projects.

And if that someone were Microsoft.

I just realised that on my home computer–internetless as it is right now, curse Bell–Windows has been relegated to a sort of seldom-used shared library sort of deal. I boot it up in virtualisation every once in a while when I want to compose something in Notion or… I can’t think of anything else right now.

Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype, etc, are all exactly the same in Ubuntu. Compiz beats the pants off any other windowing system, period.

And Windows XP is that appliance I put in a box in a closet and don’t pay much attention to except when I need it, which is rarely.

It’s a beautiful thing really. The simplest of simple technologies gives me back the choice I want. As a fanboy might put it, I no longer bow before the golden calf of Redmond.

Here’s a question for Richard Stallman: why can’t the FSF do for patents what it did for copyright?

In our office, we have two Windows 2000 servers, both of which are working just fine and doing their jobs without undue strain on the hardware. I estimate we could keep both of them going and doing what they’re doing for another three years.

Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. Support has ended or is ending for Windows 2000–their most stable OS to date in my experience–and in order to keep a well-patched web-facing server alive, we have two choices. One, we upgrade to Server 2003, and replace the boxes as well, as they’re pretty old and probably won’t handle 2003. Two, we keep what we’ve got, understanding that if vulnerabilities are found, we’ll be, well, vulnerable. Either we pay out a large ($10,000 or so) sum to upgrade, or we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

We’re a small company with a small technology budget. Guess what we’re going to do? I hate crappy hardware and upgrade cycles; there’s no good reason that a well-made server and operating system shouldn’t run for ten years without breaking down or becoming out of date. And not something you need a forklift to move.

On a related note, what is it with operating systems and applications devouring RAM and disk space? I mean, I understand that computing is more complicated than it once was, but Windows 95–piece of all-dancing crap that it was–took something like 25mb of RAM to run. Something like that. These days, only Mac OSX gets faster with each release, and I’m not sure how they can keep that up. Linux gather more moss with each passing day, and Microsoft Windows is positively ballooning with each new and less-needed version.

I ask myself a simple question: what sort of insane processing power, HD space, and RAM will one need to simply check ones email in 2015?

I was floating around on the intertubes lately, and came across a blog post (so help me, every once in a while I read a blog or two) that claimed iTunes doesn’t suck.

But you know what? That post is wrong. iTunes sucked before, and it sucks now. I have had the unusually annoying experience of trying it out on a computer at work–you know, seconds chances and all that–but came away disappointed again. Let me address a few key points.

iTunes is a system hog.

It just is. Come on people, I know you like it, but let’s not deny the facts that I’m not going to support with numbers. Instead, a worthless anecdote: I initially installed iTunes on a grey box with a fresh vanilla XP install, and it used 46mb of memory fresh out of the box (so to speak). On my sister’s computer, with a large library, playing a good old MP3, it’s using 59mb. That’s far too much memory for something as basic as a music player. WinAmp, even with all the bells and whistles, doesn’t come anywhere close. Without the bells and whistles, it’s at a quarter of the memory used.

iTunes does too much stuff. But not enough stuff.

Really, people. iTunes is wildly functional. Extravagantly functional. It plays video, for crying out loud. It generates a thousand kinds of playlists. It has a built-in music store. &cetera. Except where it needs to be. When I want to write a plugin, how do I do this? How do I play a different codec than the limited pre-chosen selection? How do I easily manage multiple collections? Any player worth its salt–including Windows Media Player, the most worthless hunk of confusing crap ever imagined in the mind of man–can do these things. Why can’t iTunes? Sure, iTunes is pretty easy to use. It’s an MP3 player for crying out loud. But who cares if it does things easily if it doesn’t do what I want it to do at all?

Note to software designers: You will never be as inventive as those who use your software. Design for extensibility. It may be hard, but it will add value you can’t even imagine to your software, and allow those who use it to use it as they see fit.

Wait, I don’t want to use iTMS.

I don’t particularly like the iTunes Music Store. I mean, I know I can get restriction-free music for a buck thirty or so, and their selection is great. So maybe I want to use iTMS and a different music store in conjunction, or maybe not use iTMS at all. How do I do this inside the program?

iTunes is locked into this proprietary iPod -> iTunes -> iTMS channel and won’t let you exit the channel except by going outside the program. Do you see how silly this is? Imagine if you bought your car from Ford, and not only were you only allowed certain Ford-approved fuels, but you had to buy them from Ford-branded petrol stations. Or if you bought a Sony television and it could only be plugged into a Sony brand electrical socket with a patented electrical plug. You wouldn’t stand for that.

Now of course, people are going to say, “Well, iTunes can handle other music store’s MP3s!” Which it does. But that functionality is only a caveat from Apple, understanding that no one in the world would use a player that only played restricted media from iTMS.

So they went another route entirely. iTMS -> iTunes -> iPod is an easy way to buy music. It’s all integrated. You literally just click a couple times, and you’re done.

Boot up Firefox -> Log in to other music store -> Download -> Drag into iTunes -> iPod is decidedly less easy. So of course, only the people know alternatives exist will use said alternatives, and then only sometimes. This is Apple’s right, of course. It’s their software. They can do with it what they like, at least within the bounds of law. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like iTunes, or even use it. I’d much rather nurse an antipathy.

But you don’t have to listen to me. I may think iTunes is annoying and bloated, but you can keep using it. That’s your right. iTunes will fade into history like every other media player has, and eventually neither of will have to worry about it.